But his useless hypocrisies did not end there; the confusion of the patricians probably suggested the order, already mentioned, that all citizens were to confess and receive the communion at least once a year, under pain of losing a third of their goods--half the forfeited property to go to the parish church of the defendant, the other to the city. And the notaries were obliged to act as spies for every testator. Now, Rienzi, in a postscript to the above letter (and I repeat that I have frequently observed in monomaniacs this fad of postscripts occurring at the end of letters), gives notice of his new edict, adding, “It seemed to us fitting that, as a second Augustus provides for the temporal profit of the Republic, he should also seek to favour and promote its spiritual welfare.” This, if one thinks about it, was a usurpation of the special rights and duties of the pontiff, even according to the most modern view of them, as also when he prescribed to the clergy special ceremonies and ecclesiastical processions of his own invention, and enacted decrees against the members of religious orders who should fail to return to Rome. This, in fact, was one of the principal accusations--and a just one--levelled against him at Prague and at Avignon, and one which he only rebutted by false statements. Elsewhere he speaks of being inspired by the Holy Spirit, with a confidence which would be altogether unintelligible except in a man who was perfectly sincere, and therefore under the influence of hallucination. A glance at other letters explains at once that the bath in the vase of Constantine was for him what the tattooed marks on his forehead were to Lazzaretti--one of those symbolic freaks to which the insane attach a peculiar significance; in fact, a kind of imperial investiture. A long letter to Charles IV., written from prison in July, 1350, dwelling on a supposed intrigue of his mother with the Emperor Henry VII., bears, in subject-matter and style, the unmistakable impress of insanity.[414] A little later (Aug. 15, 1350), we find him writing to the emperor another letter full of senseless puns, in which he tells him, with doubly absurd freaks of thought and language, how, in the idea that the mother of Severinus Boethius was descended from the kings of Bohemia (!) he had called Boethius the younger and himself, the _Severe_; and how he had adopted from them the device of the seven stars--matters which could neither interest the emperor nor be of advantage to himself, but have all the characteristics of insanity.